Aircraft on the ground have a number of safety measures to prevent damage to either equipment or those maintaining it. Often items that are designed to move in the air, need to be kept stationary when on the ground and a standard method of doing this is to fit a pin or bar that prevents rotation and is removed as part of the pre-flight checks. These pins will of course vary in length and diameter depending on the aircraft type and so need to be labelled to prevent the wrong pin being used in the wrong place or on the wrong aircraft. Today we are looking at a metal tag that was used to identify one of these safety pins, in this case for a pin used on the radar system of a Phantom jet:

The tag was made from brass with a white metal plating and the lettering is stamped deeply into the metal before being filled with red paint to ensure that it is easily visible even in poor light. The tag measures only 1 ¼” in length so the pin it would have been attached to would have been equally small! The radar for the Phantom was housed in the nose of the aircraft, which pivoted to one side to allow repair and maintenance to be undertaken, here RAF Phantoms can be seen with their noses opened and the radars removed for maintenance: